Podcast Like a Pro

Mixing spoken content with sound effects requires ducking-dropping the volume of the background to ensure the important stuff gets heard. How low you duck your background music is up to you, but we can tell you how to set it: If you started GarageBand with a new podcast or movie-score project, you'll see the ducking controls on each audio track-otherwise, select Control > Ducking. Click the up arrow on lead tracks and the down arrow on tracks you want to duck out of the way. The track-volume slider only controls the track's regular volume; to fine-tune your ducking, open the Track Info pane (press Command-I or select Track > Show Track Info) and select Master Track. Find the Ducking Amount slider near the bottom of the window, and slide it up toward 100 to increase the amount of ducking-remember, the higher you set the ducking, the quieter the sound effects get when you talk.

Define your duck: You specify how low the background sounds duck to avoid the vocals.